Is my T42p hopelessly dead?

Here's the scenerio. The comp was giving me blue screen of death errors in XP and locking up within 10-20 of booting into Windows. I thought my RAM chip was going bad so I turned on the diagonostics in the BIOS. Sure enough, during the RAM check at BIOS startup, it would occassionally lock up.

So this is where I'm dumb, I didn't have any access to any directions on how to get to the ram chip under the keyboard so I just removed almost every screw I could find. I opened up the keyboard and such and pulled out the chip under the keyboard and put in the one from the external bay.

Anyways, now when I screwed everything back in and try to turn on my laptop, it does not even turn on correctly. When i hit the power button, I see the power light turn on, the fan starts going, the harddrive spins, however I get NOTHING on the screen, no POST, nothing, it just sits there with it's fan spinning.

I tried hooking up another monitor but it does not appear to be an LCD error.

Further troubleshooting steps?

Thanks so much,
Chris

 

Here are video instructions to properly disassemble and assemble your T42: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-50233

Make sure you have installed your RAM chips correctly by viewing those videos.

 

RAM is correctly installed....if it wasn't I should still be able to get to the initial BIOS POST screen....thanks for trying to help.

 

The what chip did you take out from underneath the keyboard? I am not sure how it is designed on the T42, but on the T60, the RAM resides directly underneath the palm rest, hopefully you did not tinker with something else...

 

Same thing happened to me. MY laptop is almost 5-year-old. It turned out one of the ram slot is corrupted. So now I'm running it w/ only 256 Mb of ram. :'-( Otherwise, it works fine. Try putting only 1 ram in either one of the slot and see if the system is stable.

 

In T4x series notebooks, there is a cover that you can unscrew on the bottom of the laptop that leads to one RAM slot. The other RAM slot is inside the notebook; you have to remove the keyboard to gain access to it.

From what I gather, it seems that you had two sticks in your notebook. This may be a dumb question, but did you check both sticks for proper functionality? Or did you just pull the one out from underneath the keyboard without checking to make sure it was the defective stick? Your post seems to me to indicate the latter.

 

spellbinder, the problem is now that i can't even get into POST (into the ram test)....it's beyond a ram issue now...

 

I can't even get into my POST to see the BIOS screen anymore....the fan just runs, harddrive spins, no picture, no beeps either....

 

That's what happened to my laptop too. Just turned it off for a very long long time, then you should be able to boot it back up again. (That's what happened in my case. )

My laptop was fine for 4.5 years+. And now I don't know why one of the ram socket is corrupted. The rams themselves are fully operational; I can use either one of them in the healthy working slot. It just that particular slot that causes system instability when it's occupied by a ram.

 

It could also be the mobo is bad

 

Could try some different memory. Just buy it somewhere it's easy to return should that not be the problem.